in the Victorian Era, and undertook costume work for “Fat Pigs.” “They asked me back as a guest designer after I graduated for Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice,’” she said. “I was very well prepared for graduate school. I waited a few years after SRU before enrolling because I thought it was very important to have some real-life experience,” she said. “Before OU, I did work with the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh and its production of ‘A Little Night Music.’ I also did considerable wardrobe work, which is a good way to introduce yourself to a theater company, including City Theatre Company. I was also involved in costume coordination for the Eugene [Oregon] Ballet Co. as part of its performance of ‘The Nutcracker,’” she said. “In a graduate props class, I got to make a sword from scratch by welding all the pieces together. I also made a big neck piece out of sheet metal. I actually learned to weld at Slippery Rock University,” she said, explaining it was part of a sculpture class. After graduating from OU, Myers said she plans to “look at Chicago, since it is only three hours away from Wisconsin, and a lot of my contacts are in Chicago. They have a lot of great theater companies there. In my third year, I will be doing an internship, and I am looking at doing something in film or a television show.”
costume changes each performance with only two gentlemen in the cast. Playing multiple characters, each time they came into a room, they wore a different costume. It required real choreography backstage. At one point, the actor literally ran as the draper threw his dress in the air so he could run into it as others quickly secured the costume’s closures and he was quickly back on stage.” Most quick changes were done with the aid of Velcro. At the other extreme, McBane said, while she primarily made costumes at CATCO, she also handled design for the season’s one-person show, “Pierce to the Soul” [author: Chiquita Mullins Lee], requiring only one costume – that of an African-American folk artist. At OU, she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Costume Technology and Crafts. “There was a large quantity of work. We did four shows a year, and I was a draper helping actors into their costumes. I was also teaching undergraduate classes. My thesis project was about [Stephen] Sondheim’s musical “Assassins” and managing a costume shop with a pretty large team of people,” McBane said. Her favorite plays include “Little Shop of Horrors” [author: Howard Ashman] that she worked on while a student at SRU and at her current post at UT. Second comes the production of “Irma Vep,” which she calls, “A lot of fun – and work. “I think ‘Little Shop’ was fun because I was
just getting started, and I found out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. When I did the show again at the University of Toledo, I realize how far I had come. And, I really love the show,” she said. As an SRU student, McBane was involved in “Cabaret,” “This is Our Youth,” and won a national award for work on “Macbeth.” “Rebecca Morrice saw that I had a knack for making things, and she made sure I knew that designing costumes was not the only option in costume shop work. She helped me figure out that career path. I was lucky to know early in my college career – my sophomore year – where I wanted to go,” she said. “A whim,” McBane said, took her to Las Vegas after graduate school. “I thought I would find work, which I did, including a number of production companies in the entertainment industry providing costumes for both local and international productions. “My primary job was working for produced night club acts: Everything from the classic Vegas showgirl costume to light-up LED costumes for women rolling around in giant hamster balls. It was always something new, never the same thing twice. It was rapid paced. Sometimes we would get a morning call and I would have costumes ready the next day,” she said. While in Pittsburgh, McBane completed an internship at the Pittsburgh Public Theater and worked for the Unseam’d Shakespeare Co. Currently, SRU offers majors in acting, arts administration, and design and technology, as well as a minor in theatre.
Summer 2017
15